An example that illustrates the point falls readily to hand from current news reports on the 24/7 media cycle (CNN, FOX, MSNBC) concerning the fact that clerics in Afghanistan are intent on executing a man, Abdul Rahman, for the crime of converting from Islam to Christianity, which he did 16 years ago. Everyone from Bush, to Cheney, to Rice and Rumsfeld, are amazed and shocked that such laws exist in Muslim countries and portray this circumstance as if it were invented or dreamed up out of whole cloth three days before anyone in the West ever heard of it. What any of this actually demonstrates is the ignorance and incompetence of the Bush administration in its feeble attempts to deal with the reality of life in the Middle and Near East. If any of the people mentioned above had ever read the literary production of Western Civilization, and I do not mean obscure works by unknown authors, they would have been perfectly aware of the fact that Christian conversion by Muslims has always been considered a capital offense. The reason it is seen that way by Islamic clerics is set forth in very clear terms in Geoffrey Chaucer's "Man of Laws Tale" in the Canterbury Tales, which was written at the end of the Fourteenth Century (1387). The fact that Bush, Cheney, Rice, and Rumsfeld are illiterate should come as no surprise to anyone who has witnessed the incompetence of the decisions they have been making on our behalf since 9/11.

In Chaucer's story, which he copied from earlier sources, the daughter of the Roman Emperor, Constance, is pledged in marriage to the Sultan of Syria. The condition set by the Church for the marriage is that the Sultan, and all his barons, his entire court, must agree to convert to Christianity. They all agree and the marriage is performed. The Sultan's mother; however, does not accept the terms and plots to murder anyone who converts to the infidel's religion. She does this because abandoning belief in Islam is the most grievous sin a Muslim can commit, assuring that anyone who does so will be condemned to eternal suffering in Hell. At the wedding feast the Sultan's mother strikes and everyone who converted to Christianity, including her own son, is executed. Constance is cast adrift in a rudderless boat to see if she can learn how to sail it back to Italy. In too many ways the Bush administration seems caught in this same circumstance.

At the risk of putting mud in the water, I can also mention the fact that Christians used to execute people who refused to convert to Christianity, Christians executed backsliders and heretics by the hundreds and thousands in years gone by. Being outraged now, simply because most denominations have forgone that pleasure, seems a little hypocritical. A point here, if one reads below the line, is how much alike Christianity and Islam actually are in the way they separately perceive vital issues of belief and doctrine. I actually want to go a step beyond asserting similarity and suggest instead that these two religions are virtually indistinguishable from each other. I am perfectly aware of the fact that neither Christian nor Muslim will accept such an absurd idea, that ten thousand arguments and fifty thousand examples can be offered up to disprove the validity of this assertion. Don't bother, unless you have nothing better to do, because what I want to suggest about the nature of the Christian/Muslim conflict is directed, not toward doctrine and belief, but at the animosity that has always existed between these two perceptions of man's relationship to God. Why has it persisted for 1,400 years, literally since Islam first conquered Jerusalem in 638 AD, and why has it always been so vicious and unrelenting over the entire history of that antagonism? The most recent example, of course, is the airplane attack against the WTC on 9/11 and Bush's pre-emptive invasion of Iraq in supposed response to it on 3/19/03.

As everyone knows, of course, Christianity emerged from a purely Arabic consciousness and was purely Semitic in its foundational ideology. It was an offshoot of Judaism, a variation of Jewishness. Christianity belonged to the Arabs of the world during the first several centuries of its existence. The Savior, and the salvation and redemption He promised, was the strict and absolute preserve of Arabic people. History, however, conspired against Arabs when the missionary impulse to spread the Word became a primary motivating force of the Faith. Rome picked it up like a portable bag of tricks that promised immortality to its adherents and carried it out and away from its natural homeland into western and northern Europe. It took root in that north country and in time became the religion, not of Arabs, but of white-skinned northern Europeans. Pope Gregory I sent a monk named Augustine to England in 596 AD to convert the Anglo-Saxons to Christianity--he was successful and became the first Archbishop of Canterbury. There were Danes (Beowulf for instance) in England at the time who were also converted the Christianity. They returned to DENMARK after the French invasion of Anglo-Saxon England in 1066 AD. They took the Faith back to DENMARK with them. I don't want to be too heavy-handed here but why is it that the entire Islamic world exploded in rage and violence because a Danish newspaper published 12 "anti-Muslim" cartoons in the Fall of 2005. One should think Soren Kierkegaard in this context. Not that he had anything to do with the cartoons himself, but his version of Christianity, even down to the way he lived his daily life as a practioner of irony in the streets of Copenhagen, which I have written about some in this enterprise (SK1; SK2; SK3; SK4), express the essence of how non-Arabic Christianity has become in its long life in northern European consciousness.

A point to be taken here is that the exodus of Christianity into the alien world (to Arabs) of northern and western Europe pulled the heart and soul of human immortality out of the reach of the people who invented it in the first place. They (Arabs) lost their Savior. They lost their salvation. They lost their redemption. They were excluded, if only in their minds, from ready access to every promise Christianity holds out to sinful people. Hence, a "new" religious ideology had to be invented to replace the one that had been stolen by the white-skinned northern and western Europeans. Islam was born to fill the void left by the absence of Jesus Christ, who unaccountably seemed to prefer the company of white-skinned sinners. That Islam is so nearly identical to Christianity should surprise no one--if Christians had it right, then the replacement religion had to claim virtually the same thing. Rename the Savior and call him Mohammad; rename God and call him Allah--leave virtually everything else unchanged. Now, sure, this is a vast oversimplification but the point is not to parse differences between one thing and the other but to suggest a reason for 1,500 years of vicious sectarian warfare between Christians and Muslims. Why is the struggle so vicious? Why has it lasted so long? Why is there no end in sight? Because both sides in the war are fighting for the same mutually exclusive ideological ground.

Go back to the Danish cartoons. What could be more insulting to Muslims than having the very people (northern Europeans) who hijacked their first and best Faith turn to mocking the replacement forced on them by the appropriation of the true Savior of sinful humanity. This is called adding insult to injury. The rage and outrage in the Islamic street over what seems to many people a silly issue is only what one should expect from a people who had its first Faith stolen and its replacement mocked by the people who appropriated the true one.

The other, added dimension to the struggle is that fundamental extremism insists that only one TRUTH exists. Since both Christianity and Islam cannot be the one true religion, since they must by definition be mutually exclusive of each other, an idea reinforced by their similarity, all-out war for supremacy is the only alternative most true believers can envision.

How any of this fits into a critque of the Bush administration's response to 9/11 fell out into plain sight, not months or years after the WTC collapsed, but only three days later when Bush referred to his impending retaliation against the terrorist as a "CRUSADE." One of two things is true: either Bush chose to use that word deliberately or he did it without considering the consequences of his language. Most likely, and looking at subsequent statements, and the way he has handled his job overall, he used that word as mindlessly as he has done everything else in his time in office. This matters because every previous battle between Christians and Muslims in the 1,500 year struggle between the two religions has been characterized by the Muslims as a CRUSADE. European Christians are referred to by Muslims as crusaders. That term is not positive. It is not a compliment. It is a condemnation of every real and imaginary wrong committed against Islam by imperialistic Christians. It is a call to JIHAD, holy war against the infidel. For Bush to wrap himself and us in that terminology, that ideology, deliberately or not, has condemned the US to playing out a holy war that has already raged for 1,500 years. When Bush said last week that a future President would be the one to reduce our troop levels in Iraq, whether he knew it or not, he was not referring to the one who will be elected in 2008 as most pundits suggest. The possibility that we will be electing Presidents in 3,500 AD is not very likely. If there are people and religions then, like the ones we have now, the war against terrorism will still be raging between here and there. To call Bush's war "A Long War," does not quite do justice to what he has condemned us to. To those who say, and insist, that Bush did only what was necessary in response to 9/11, bomb Afghanistan and invade Iraq, I say his lack of imagination, his ignorance of historical reality, his managerial incompetence, left HIM no choice but the one he followed. He took the easiest course. Why not capture the people responible for 9/11, Osama bin Laden, say, and turn them/him over to an international war-crimes commission, in the Hague for instance, and do justice to them/him in a way that does not cost as many more American lives as bin Laden took on 9/11.

There is an answer to that question, of course. Bush would say what he said about the UN in the runup to the Iraq war: we cannot trust international courts to bring justice to al-Qaeda terrorists. Another way to answer the question is to notice that Bush has been incapable of finding bin Laden since 9/11. Dropping 2,000 pound smart-bombs on semi-nomadic tribespeople in the wilderness of Afghanistan is a much better way to punish someone for the outrage of the WTC attack. Invading Iraq, which had nothing to do with 9/11, in spite of what he and Cheney still claim, is a much better way to bring justice to someone. Bush played that into a second term. Politically, at least, one cannot argue with his logic--how else could a totally incompetent fool maintain power for five years? No other way to do it.

With respect to the issue of civil liberties and how Bush and his administration have been waging war against them, a recent exchange at his last press conference, when he finally relented and actually asked Helen Thomas a question (she said he would regret it), illustrates a primary tactic in that effort. She asked him to explain to the American people what his real reason for wanting to go to war in Iraq was. After hearing his answer, Richard Cohen, a political writer for the Washington Post, said he had been a hold-out in believing that Bush had ever lied to the American people until he heard Bush's answer to Thomas's question--he now conceeds that Bush lies most of the time. Bush did not offer a "real" reason for going to war--he did not answer the question asked--but instead spent ten minutes denying that he "wanted" to go to war. "No President wants war," he said. Evidence to the contrary where Bush is concerned is widely known and Cohen cited numerious examples to show precisely that Bush both wanted and intended to wage war on Iraq from the day after 9/11 in 2001. A nation that does not know the truth, does not hear the truth from its elected leaders, is a nation under the rule of a despotic dictator, not one being governed by leaders who protect and insure civil liberties. The most important civil liberty Americans enjoy is the right to be told the truth.

Since Bush refuses to explain why we are really at war in Iraq, that ground is open for speculation. Needless to say, I have some thoughts about what has really motivated Bush's decision to invade Iraq. As with any conspiracy theory, of course, and I have nothing more than that to offer, few facts and little evidence can be found to support my perception. A single statement that Bush repeats every time he discusses the war in Iraq underlies my sense of why he decided to go to war in Iraq the day after 9/11. I remember hearing Richard Clarke, the Clinton/Bush head of counterterrorism, express his dismay at a meeting with Bush on 9/12 in which the President asked (ordered) him and his staff to gather proof that Saddam was behind the attack on the WTC. Clarke explained to Bush that al-Qaeda was responsible for 9/11 but Bush insisted that Saddam had done it. He ultimately bent temporarily to the combined efforts of his counterterrorism team and agreed to attack Afghanistan initially since it was the home of al-Qaeda. Bush, however, did not give up his desire and intention to wage war against Iraq. This was partly the thrust of Helen Thomas's question at the news conference. Bush's answer to questions about why he chose to fight in Iraq usually includes the assertion that if America fights terrorists in Iraq it will not have to fight them at home. On the face of the claim, one is compelled to point out that there is no cause and effect relationship between the two halves of that assertion. Fighting terrorists in one place does not exclude the possibility of having to fight them somewhere else. For Bush's assertion to be true, the presence of the American army in Iraq somehow makes it impossible for terrorists to be anywhere else in the world at the same time. Our presence in Iraq functions as a magnet that draws all terrorists to that one place and prevents them from choosing to be anywhere else, prevents them from choosing to launch an attack everywhere else in the world as long as we are in Iraq. That claim is nonsense.

But wait. That claim could be true if other circumstances were in the mix that no one else knows anything about. I have been wondering for some time why Bush seems so certain that an otherwise absurd assertion, one that makes no logical sense whatsoever, has come to be carved in stone in his assessment of the endless struggle between Christianity and Islam. Why is Bush so certain, and he seems to be that in this case, that al-Qaeda will not attack the US homeland as long as he "stays the course" in Iraq. One could say that this case is simply another demonstration of the endless delusion the Bush administration has brought to the fight against terrorism. This is just another fantasy the neocons have adopted to justify the continuing cost to the American prople that their failed policies have generated since 9/11. Bush cannot admit making mistakes so he stretches logic into an argument that seems plausible enough, as long as no one actually analyzes it, to maintain the false front of his failure to capture or kill bin Laden. That is another part of this same puzzle: why did Bush shift the focus of the war effort from Afghanistan, where bin Laden certainly was after 9/11, to Iraq, where he certainly was not and had never been, if his intention was to find and eliminate the person responsible for attacking the WTC? That makes no sense. Is Bush really that mentally challenged?

I come back to that assertion: as long as we fight them in Iraq we will not have to fight them in America. Let us assume that Bush knows something that the rest of us do not about his assertion that "staying the course" in Iraq prevents terrorist attacks against the US homeland. Who were the hijackers on 9/11? Fifteen of them were citizens of Saudi Arabia. Who is Osama bin Laden? He is a citizen of Saudi Arabia. Another question that comes to mind: who benefits the most from Bush's war against terrorists in Iraq? Not America since it has cost almost as many deaths for our people now as we lost on 9/11 and since we have spent almost $500 billion in three years fighting Bush's war. It has not benefited the Iraqis much at all unless you accept the idea that "democratic" chaos, and the right to wage civil war, is somehow a benefit. The only group of people on the face of the earth who have benefited from Bush's war is the Royal Family of Saudi Arabia. How do they benefit? The second largest proven oil reserves in the world are in Iraq. The largest reserves, of course, are in Saudi Arabia and are completely controlled by the Saudi Royal Family. How many barrels of oil have the Iraqis sold on the world market since March 19, 2003, when Bush started his war of choice in Iraq? I don't actually know the answer to that question but I'm reasonably certain that ZERO comes pretty close to the total number. Iraqi oil production has been completely suppressed since the invasion and there is no sign today that anything much is being done to change those production figures.

OK. What does that mean? Without competition from Iraq, Saudi production is high enough world-wide to virtually dictate the price of a barrel of oil. By choosing to lower or raise production the Saudi Royal Family can determine how much anyone pays for energy. The price hovers around $65 per barrel and has been at that level since the Iraq war began. Without competition from Iraq, the Saudi Royal Family enjoys a considerable spike in the amount of money it can collect from the rest of the world. If Iraqi production returned to pre-war levels, the Saudis would have less control over the price, which would probably fall, even perhaps back to $35 per barrel, and they would also see a decline in the market share they now enjoy as a result of the absence of Iraqi production.

The question that keeps ringing in my ears is: why is Bush so certain that, as long as the US prosecutes its war in Iraq, there will be no terrorist attacks launched on US soil? Saying that Bush is delusional when he links two things that are not connected by any sensible cause and effect principle, that he is simply an irrational fool when he does so, and does so merely for his own political gain, a strategy that has worked up to now, is the same as accepting an easy, convinent answer to a question that might point to what might be a much more troubling possibility. What if the Saudi Royal Family actually has the power to influence, even control, al-Qaeda and Osama bin Laden? Bin Laden is a Saudi citizen whose family has very close ties to the Royal family. In fact, on 9/12/01, the day after the WTC tragedy, two groups of Saudi citizens in the US were flown out of the country by the US government when all commercial flights had been grounded. The arrangements for this special dispensation, granted to absolutely no one else, were made by James A. Baker III, a leading manager of the Carlyle Group (a consulting firm that has only one client--the Saudi Royal Family). Baker, of course, was deeply involved in derailing the re-count of votes in Florida before the Supreme Court gave the 2000 election to George W. Bush. The two groups that got out of the country before anyone in them were questioned by the FBI?--members of the Saudi Royal Family and members of the bin Laden family. This doesn't prove anything, of course, but it seems rather suspicious that people of the same country who gave us 15 (out of 19) of the 9/11 hijackers were given a free-pass out of the country that was attacked before anyone knew for sure who was responsible for the attack. But wait--why would Bush allow the removal of Saudi citizens at a time when he was instructing his couterterrorism chief to investigate and prove that Saddam and Iraq were responsible for 9/11? The terrorism chief, Richard Clarke, claims he knew al-Qaeda and bin Laden were responsible ten or fifteen minutes after he saw the passenger manifests from the four planes that crashed on 9/11 because he recognized the names of several members of the terrorist network. Imagine his shock and awe when Bush all but ordered him to prove Saddam was behind the attacks.

So, the conspiracy theory goes like this: the Saudi royals control or influence Al Qaeda or bin Laden or both enough to prevent direct attacks on US soil as long as Bush "stays the course" in Iraq and continues to suppress the production of Iraqi oil. This enables the Saudis to dictate the price of crude (back up to $70 per barrel yesterday) and reap the profits, for the short term at least, of being the world's leading supplier of oil. They would do this too, now especially, because some petroleum experts believe that the Saudi fields have reached, or soon will reach, their peak production levels after which their own production will rapidly decline as it becomes more and more expensive to produce oil from depleated reserves. Many experts have stated the price of crude would fall back to $20 or $30 per barrel if Iraqi oil production rose to a level consistent with a peacetime industrial culture with a stable government and normal social institutions. One can say here that Bush's bungling of the war in Iraq is the result of his incompetence, that he and his administration are totally inept. To be so perfectly inept and incompetent; however, as Bush has been, seems more the result of careful planning and execution than it does the result of blind accident.

Kevin Phillips, in American Theocracy, presents a considerably different view of the oil situation in Iraq and the way it has and will affect OPEC production realities--his view is considerably more well-informed than my own--mostly because he has actually researched the history of the issue--where I tend more to say what I pick up in casual reading. He sees no conspiracy between the Royal Family and the Bush administration and stresses the fact that Bush is simply incompetent in his execution of foreign policy. One thing my position clearly suggests is that Bush is more concerned with the welfare of the Saudi Royals and his own political legacy than he is with the American people. Everyone here has had to spend more and more income on gasoline. That works against the consumer culture Bush has relied on to bolster his approval ratings, unless you count purchases of fuel as part of what is keeping America's economy afloat--which it has--but at a rapidly diminishing beneficial additive to an economy held hostage to energy consumption. I have a natural distrust for conspiracy theories--even my own--and offer this one simply because I have not been able to comprehend any part of Bush's strategy for invading Iraq. This, at least, suggests a sensible reason for why he might have done it.

Phillips puts two ideas forward to explain Bush's motivation: it was necessary for the US to secure Iraqi oil for domestic consumption; and/or, he was responding to right-wing pressure to hasten the Second Coming by starting a war in the Middle East that would fulfill "Biblical" prophecy. The first argument is well-developed and very credible. There is so much unharvested oil in Iraq, oil that is very inexpensive to extract ($1.00 per barrel), that the oil cencession itself will net somewhere between $4 or $5 trillion for the company that receives it. Exxon/Mobil is the preferred company to reveive the Iraqi oil concession because it is one of only two US based companies in existence connected to the petroleum industry. Having that concession fall into the hands of a foreign country (China, India, Japan, Russia) will not improve the US strategic profile in any useful way because we will still be paying huge amounts of money into the treasuries of countries that already hold too much of our national debt. If Exxon/Mobil does not secure the Iraqi oil concession for future development, it will have holding that are rapidly diminishing and in short order will probably move into bankruptcy. That would be a crippling blow to the US economy, compounding the travail coming along with the economic collapse of Ford and GM that seems perilously close to reality. Iraqi oil, then, really is essential to the survival of the US as the world's only remaining superpower, economically, militarily, and politically. Phillips makes this point with convincing argument.

The problem faced by the Bush administration where the oil argument is concerned, of course, is that he and they have consistently denied from the very beginning that the invasion was motivated by any concern for or about Iraqi oil. Weapons of Mass Destruction, Saddam's Evil nature, spreading freedom and democracy across the Middle East, nation building, took their turn as explanations for why we had to invade Iraq. Oil was not only never mentioned but was pointedly denied as the reason behind the invasion. Today, with the wheels already off the war-wagon itself and virtually no support at home for continuing his military adventure in Iraq, Bush cannot use the one argument that might turn the tide against the flood of negative assessments swirling around his botched foreign policy decisions. Appeals to SUV-driving Americans, facing another round of $3.00 per gallion gasoline prices at home, with more of the same in the future, based on the notion that "staying the course" in Iraq is the only hope any of them have to go on driving gas-hog trucks, vans, and SUVs for the next forty years is simply an appeal Bush eliminated from his arsenal of rhetoric in the run-up to the invasion. He cannot say it now. He would be hooted from the stage. Taking the truth off the table from the gitgo has buried Bush in a morass of lies from which he cannot now escape. One of the consequences of political lying is that it traps you in the prison of your own dishonesty.

Bush's other problem, the Christian fundamentalists' perception that Iraq symbolizes the "NEW BABYLON" and must be destroyed in the war they call "ARMAGEDDON," a view Bush himself may embrace, before the "SECOND COMING" can get started, is one that cannot be addressed at all in any serious discussion or debate about US foreign policy in the Middle East. How can Bush say, in answer to Helen Thomas's question about the real reason he invaded Iraq, that he did it in order to hasten the Second Coming? Bush would not be impeached if he made that claim; he would be incarcerated in an asylum for the criminally insane. Perhaps he should be. There is a growing body of opinion, but not too much fact, that Bush has not been working to appease his religious right constituency, working to maintain their support, but has instead been attempting to create an environment in the geopolitical arena that will pull the world into a cataclysmic sinkhole of sectarian violence and warfare that nearly anyone could recognize in the context of Biblical prophesy.

All this is possible but not necessarily true. Unless Bush actually tells us, answers Thomas's question as it were, we will not have a definitive answer to the mystery of why he invaded Iraq. Given the circumstances on the ground today, there is some reason to believe Bush went into Iraq to fashion one of the most resounding defeats in the history of modern warfare, not a defeat of our "enemies," but a defeat of ourselves or himself. If you take what he has accomplished and make that the benchmark of his intention, then clearly defeat must have been what was on his mind in the run-up to the war. I have this dark assessment of the situation in Iraq because of the nine-hour gun battle in the streets of Baghdad this week between two groups of Iraqis (Shiite versus Sunni)that looked like an action one would expect in a civil war. Once the civil war starts, and it has probably been going on now for some weeks or months, our military role there is doomed to failure.

Answers to all these questions seem to have surfaced in a new book by Michael Gordon and Bernard Trainor entitled Cobra II: The Inside Story of the Invasion and Occupation of Iraq. I have not finished reading it yet but have gotten through the first one-third of their reporting. In that part of the book, the authors detail what they have learned about the planning of the invasion (pre-9/11 to March 18, 2003). The war started on the 19th of March. Donald Rumsfeld was in charge of the planning and spent most of his energy on restricting the invasion force to 125,000 troops. He cut any proposal that exceeded that limit back to his magic number and would not accept any plan that pushed the number higher than that. One could say he was obsessed with restricting his fighting force to 125,000 soldiers. This was part of Rumsfeld's wider plan to transform the US military from a large-force (500,000) response effort to a "lean, mean fighting machine" that could deploy in weeks, not months, and utilize suprise, as opposed to overwhelming force, as the primary means of defeating America's enemies in the post-9/11 world. In the first Gulf War, Colin Powell insisted on a minimum of 500,000 soldiers to drive Iraqi forces out of Kuwait in 1991. Bush I's failure to topple Saddam's regime was perceived by Bush II advisors as a profound failure of US strategy in the Middle East and Rumsfeld, for one, was determined to change that to total victory by bringing down the Evil Dictator of the New Babylon.

The planning of the Second Gulf War, according to Gordon and Trainor, envisioned four phases. Phases 1, 2, and 3, would end when Saddam was driven from power and came to be symbolized by the toppling of his statue in Baghdad which received widespread media coverage when an Iraqi citizen ran up to the statue's dislocated head and began beating on it with a shoe. A few days later, May 1, 2003, George W. Bush appeared on the deck of a US aircraft carrier in the Pacific Ocean and announced, under a banner which said the same thing, that the "Mission was accomplished." What mission precisely was Bush referring to? Was he delusional? Did he not realize that the war to free and stabilize Iraq had only just begun? If, or when, you compare the planning to the mission, it turns out that Bush was telling the absolute truth to the American people when he said that the "mission" had been "accomplished." The mission that Rumsfeld, et. al., planned ended when Saddam's statue in Baghdad was toppled, even better than expected, the head of the statue broke off and rolled away!!!! To the neocon-warmongers in the White House and Congress removing Saddam from power was the only mission any of them embraced--Gordon and Trainor make this perfectly clear in their recreation of the 16 months of planning that went into the war. In late February and early March, even just weeks before the war began, an afterthought attempt was made to establish some form of planning for what would happen in Iraq after Saddam was taken down. Everything we have seen there since May 1, 2003, is the direct result of the total absence of planning for the post-Saddam Iraqi world.

Rumsfeld, for instance, made some curiously insensitive comments about the looting that took place at the National Museum of Iraq. He dismissed the seriousness of the event by blaming the media for showing an individual leaving the Museum with a single vase, as if the media were somehow responsible for the looting, because CNN showed the same scene over and over again. Rumsfeld's point was that only one vase went missing but the coverage suggested that hundreds had been stolen. After minimizing the extent of the looting, Rumsfeld further dismissed the chaos in Baghdad by stating that Democracy was a "messy" business. Saying that suggests that a cleaning crew of illegal aliens (Hispanics for instance) can be brought in on a weekend to clean up the mess Democracy made during its post-championship arrival party. Messes do not require planning to clean up. You just pick up the big pieces and run the vacuum across the rug. Since that early episode, Iraq has stumbled headlong into an all-out civil war, or, as the Bushies suggest, has lapsed momentarily into a few incidents of sectarian strife. The plan to cure this is to force the reluctant Iraqis to embrace a government of National Unity, whose leaders are, and will be, only people acceptable to the non-planning cadre of neocon idiots who created the vaccuum in which the disunity first appeared. If a government of National Unity were possible in Iraq, could come into existence just because Bush says it should, there probably would not be any sectarian violence raging across the country in the first place. "Don't fight now. Play nice." That's a plan?

So, what conclusion can be drawn from this? Going back to Helen Thomas's question: what was the real reason Bush wanted to invade Iraq? I'm thinking that Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and the rest of the neocon nitwits running this country, came up with a theory about how best to prosecute a war in the "post-9/11" world, a theory that exactly matches the war Tommy Franks and Rumsfeld planned, with a small force (125,000 troops) that could be rapidly and invisibly (to the enemy) deployed, would cost little or nothing compared to Colin Powell's 500,000-man army in Gulf War I, could strike quickly, even into Baghdad from Kuwait, and accomplish its mission in less than 45 days. When the statue in Baghdad fell 41 days after the "shock and awe" of March 19th, the 3-phase mission of Gulf War II was accomplished and Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld/Rice proved that their theory was true. Unfortunately, no one gave a thought, or a troop deployment, or a rat's ass, to what might happen as a consequence of pulling Saddam down from his pedestal in Baghdad. Looting, chaos, insurgency, civil war--goodness gracious--Democracy is messy. The war was not about weapons of mass destruction, Iraqi oil, deposing an Evil Dictator, spreading freedom and democracy across the Middle East--those are excuses and justifications--the war was about testing a theory to prove to Rumsfeld's detractors that the plan to transform the US military into a "lean, mean fighting machine" would work. It was not about anything else. In terms of the first three phases the theory is unrivaled when the world's only remaining superpower pre-emptively invades a third world country whose military consists of people riding around in Toyota pickup trucks armed with AK-47s and RPGs. In terms of phase-4; however, Rummy's planning leaves a little thing like success hanging under a bridge across the Euphrates river, just below the headpiece of the Craddle of Civilization.

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